Concept, content and the convict

This paper describes the concepts behind and implementation of the multimedia art work Alan01 / AlanOnline , which wakes up the 1952 criminally convicted Alan Turing as a piece of code within the art work - thus fulfilling Turing's own vision of preserving human consciousness in a computer. The work's context is described within the development of associative storytelling structures built up by interactive user feedback via an image and video retrieval system. The input to the retrieval system is generated by Alan01 / AlanOnline via their respective sketch interfaces, the output of the retrieval system being fed back to Alan01 / AlanOnline for further processing and presentation to the user within the context of the overall artistic experience. This paper, in addition to presenting the productions and image retrieval system, also presents the installation and online production user reception and some of the issues and observations made during the development of the systems.